


What Was Lost, and What Remains

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Memory Loss, Parenthood, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:00:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29192712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: My name is Monica Joan Wilkins. I am 57 years old. I live in Sydney, New South Wales. I share a dental practice with my husband. We've been married for thirty-two years.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 159
Kudos: 476
Collections: Dramione Valentine Exchange





	What Was Lost, and What Remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Seakays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seakays/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [DramioneValentineExchange](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/DramioneValentineExchange) collection. 



> **Prompt:** A Drabble from Dr. Granger’s POV  
> Happy Valentine's Day, [Seakays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seakays/pseuds/Seakays/works)!
> 
> Gratitude to [Dreamsofdramione](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bugggghead/pseuds/dreamsofdramione/works) for beta help. All remaining mistakes are my own.

My name is Monica Joan Wilkins. I am 57 years old. I live in Sydney, New South Wales. I share a dental practice with my husband. We've been married for thirty-two years.

Each morning, following my shower, I scrape the fogged bathroom mirror with the edge of my hand. Staring at my reflection, I repeat these words.

I hope that someday, I’ll discover which ones are true.

* * *

Wendell and I have lived in Sydney for six years. I possess this fact with a marked degree of certainty—one of several shores I can cling to, solid as the layers of rust-colored clay beneath the pavement.

On Saturdays, we enjoy walks through our suburban neighborhood. We pass houses and shop fronts, are passed by bicyclists and parents pushing strollers, each of us having bought a pastry and a coffee. Circling the perimeter of the municipal park, I watch children enjoy the playground. They swing from the climbing frame and emerge from the tube slide with wide, healthy smiles on their faces.

We chose to not have children. I know it was our decision, but I can’t recall making it—the many conversations it must have entailed. Gaps exist where I should have memories, and many memories retreat when I approach them. In the hour of exaggerated anxiety before I fall asleep each night, I imagine that if I could get close enough, and circle around their sides, I would see that they were flat, cardboard constructions. They would fall apart in a breeze.

But Wendell and I are happy, just the two of us. 

I drink my coffee, tasting nothing, and take his hand in mine.

* * *

A month into our seventh Australian year, I wake up drowning in a flood.

The ache breaching my insides and pouring down my cheeks is for England, and something else I don’t understand.

We have no family to return to. We sold our home. We have one another, and need nothing more.

But with uncharacteristic spontaneity—with uncommon force—I suggest to Wendell that we go back. He agrees, without deliberation, without ambivalence, his face untensing into naked relief. 

In December, we board a plane and turn our backs on the scraping Antipodean heat.

* * *

We purchase a cottage in Wiltshire, with a spare room for guests, and beds of sleeping roses out back.

At a dreary latitude, in the darkest winter weeks, I weep openly at the deliverance of coming home.

* * *

In my lunch hours, I sometimes visit the bookshop in the village high street. It’s small and cramped, its shelves in charming disarray.

In January, I read a notice for a book club. I tell the proprietor my name, and she writes it on her list.

The shop is otherwise empty, except for a man standing in the stacks holding a copy of a book about shorebirds.

He’s pale and narrow, tall and grave. A handsome man—beautiful, I think—with a head of neat, white-blond hair, and dressed in a black wool suit.

I spell out my name. I purchase my books.

He stares, and he stares, and he stares.

* * *

The club convenes on a Saturday morning, overcast and cold, to discuss an American novel.

From my chair by the window, my book in my lap, I watch a woman come through the door.

She’s the age I was when I was first married, her wild dark hair twisted high on her head. When she rounds the corner toward our meeting space, I draw the attention of my immediate neighbor with a gasp.

She takes her seat across from me.

Her name is rare, plucked from _The Iliad._

Our discussion circles around fate and violence, justice and morality, but all I can do is look at her.

Her mouth and chin are her own, but the terrain from her cupid’s bow to the curling riot of her hairline is Wendell, his features feminized and refined, but brutally exact.

As the cardboard castle of my memory shudders and folds, she watches me with my husband’s brown eyes.

* * *

She asks if I'm married. Is my husband nearby? How long have we lived in Wiltshire? How was our flight from Australia? Where are we living? Do I have roses in the garden? Will we stay? When is my birthday? Was it really last week? Happy birthday. She lives near town with her husband. Would we like to come to dinner? She doesn’t mean to presume. But would we come? Could we come? When could we come?

She speaks rapidly.

She’s thin—

_thinner than I remember_

_—_ and while one never assumes, and never pries, I notice the curve of her belly beneath her hand.

Your name, I tell her, is in the book my husband was reading on the day we first met.

How did you meet? she asks.

This is one of my solid recollections: Wendell—only not Wendell, his name is a fissure in the scene—lying in the grass at university. His dark hair curled over one eye.

 _I’d thought myself immune—_ his drowsy voice, mere days later, wrapped with satisfying awkwardness in my bed sheets _—and then your arrow caught the back of my heel._

These words are precious. I keep them where they can’t be touched, buried in the center of my heart.

We met, I tell her, because of our shared enthusiasm for mythology.

That’s lovely, she says.

Her eyes—

_she’s a carbon copy of her father_

—fill with water.

* * *

Did we want children?

I ask him that night, in the dark.

I’m hoping with all of my heart that he'll laugh. Accuse me of madness.

But he gives me silence, then offers a truth.

We did, he says. We tried.

For a long time? I ask.

Years.

Did she come to us? Eventually?

I don’t know, he says. I can’t recall. Sometimes I think I’ve grasped it, but it pours through my fingers like sand.

* * *

She lives in a vast estate, larger than any country house I’ve ever toured. Peacocks cry on the lawn.

Her husband is stoic and still. I watch his hand flex to touch her. I watch him draw it away.

Without much trouble, I am unaccountably relieved to think, he will learn to be an affectionate father.

She’s solicitous that we should enjoy our meal, which she’s made in collaboration with her husband. She’d like us to feel at home.

They’ve remodeled the entire house, made it modern and warm. A place where a young family can grow.

We leave our spouses in the drawing room, and she guides me on a tour.

I marvel to myself at the mindless magnitude of wealth between two such very young people. They’ve been married for four years. My expression when she tells me seems to trouble her.

They're young. I was never this young.

We fell so deeply in love, she tells me. We’re still so in love. I’ve never felt more certain of anything in my life.

But your career?

I know I have no right to ask.

She works for the government. He supports her every ambition.

Is he kind to you? I ask. Is he _kind?_

We whisper in the hall, and I wipe at my eyes.

I have the desire, hysterical and overwhelming, to take her in my arms.

You might not think it, she says, it takes patience to know him, but his devotion to my happiness is complete.

* * *

Wendell and Monica.

Monica and Wendell.

Our names abrade.

We wear shoes that will never break in.

* * *

She and I are immediately the fastest of friends.

There is so much we have in common. Our love of Chekov. Our passion for politics. Our preference for tea before milk.

Once, at lunch in London, our waiter mentions our identical laughs.

When she signs a credit card receipt, I write my own name on a serviette.

Look, I say. Our handwriting is so alike.

Granger-Malfoy.

Wilkins.

Granger.

Granger.

Granger.

* * *

I buy things for her child—just little bits.

I browse through a book with heavy paperboard pages.

_One Sunday morning, the warm sun came up—_

She's going to be a mother.

Blink, and you'll—

_I missed it_

* * *

We’re out together, the four of us, at the opera and then dinner and drinks.

She’s entering her third trimester, beginning to feel an intensified alienation from her body. She’s wondering when she’ll be done.

Will your mother be there for the birth?

I mean nothing by it. It’s a passing question, drying our hands in the ladies’.

Her eyes widen, and when she cries, I give in to a riptide of indefinable yearning, and stroke my hand through her hair.

I’ve tried, she says, I keep trying. I don’t know what I’ve done.

Sometimes, I tell her, I think I knew you as a little girl.

* * *

I imagine a too-large nappy around her pink body, basking in an incubator.

A thatch of impossible hair.

She might have broken a tooth.

It might have healed itself.

I picture reading Charlotte’s Web to her at two years old.

I see her slipping like a shining minnow in the bath.

* * *

I believe you loved books, I say. We’re holding hands on a chaise in her sitting room, the evening abandoned, her husband pacing on the other side of the door.

I have no reason to think this, I tell her. No reason to know. But more than anything, for you, it was books.

She hiccups, and asks me if I’d like to feel the baby move.

She’s very strong, she says. She’s feisty.

I tell her: like her mother.

I want my mother, she says.

_she hasn’t cried like this since she was a tiny thing_

I know you do.

I know.

* * *

Wendell and I are called to her home in a solemn summons that sets us both on the course to a single, anxious brandy when we arrive.

She’s there with her husband, and a pair of people who look at us with discomforting interest.

She begins.

I’ve consulted over a dozen Healers—

_healers_

—I was petrified that if I told you, it would cause you harm. But they're confident that while we may never fully remove the memory charm—

_charm_

—I can tell you who you are.

* * *

There are beliefs that live in the mind.

There are realities that persist in your heart.

I imagined a daughter, once.

Like magic, she became real.

* * *

My name is Moira Jean Granger. I am 58 years old. I live in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. I share a dental practice with my husband. We've been married for thirty-three years.

Most evenings, once I’m home from work, my daughter phones me.

I’ve forgotten a great deal. But I remember enough to help ease her mind when her own daughter is sick, or bending the developmental curve, or it’s a day that ends in a Y.

My granddaughter has her grandfather’s eyes. She has an affectionate father, and fine white hair. If I press my nose to the crown of her head, she smells of milk and scentless shampoo.

I hope that one day, when she’s older, she’ll ask me to tell her what's true.


End file.
